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FX’s Legion Is Mind Bendingly Awsome!

Marvel’s Legion on FX is the most unique comic book show on the air.  Thanks to Legion’s powers and psychosis you never know what is real and what isn’t, yet it somehow manages to plot an interesting path with its story even though there are seemingly no fixed points fact wise.  Series like this are starting to reveal the full potential of comic book adaptations.

While this show takes place inside the impossible to figure out X-Men movie continuity, you will not need to have seen or understand any of that to enjoy this show.  Just know that crazy things happen when a powerful mutant looses his mind, or at least thinks he has.  It is one of the weirdest shows on TV and I cannot wait to see more!

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Z Is An Okay Beginning

Amazon’s new show ‘Z: The Beginning of Everything’ focuses on the life Zelda Fitzgerald and her tumultuous relationship with famed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It is fine start to the show, but if Amazon wants it to catch on like their other prestige shows they will have to up the ante a little.

The show starts off during World War One with Zelda (Christina Ricci) flirting with the soldiers that come to town for training.  During a high society party she meets the man of her dreams: a struggling writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (David Hoflin).  Of course her parents don’t approve, but when Scott finishes his first book and it is a massive success, Zelda runs off to marry him and live the good life.

My problem with this show is that none of the characters really grow.  Zelda kind of learns that life isn’t going to be what she dreamed it would be, and Scott becomes more of a jerk, but there is no real ark.  The show drifts from one party to another.  I wish it would have gotten deeper in to who the Fitzgeralds are/were.  Part of the problem is the running time.  Each episode is only thirty minutes long, so factoring in beginning credits and ending credits, it is hard tell an interesting story with twenty minutes of screen time.

Christina Ricci is the reason to watch this show.  She puts everything she has in to Zelda.  It is like Zelda Fitzgerald has come to life in your living room.  David Hoffin is not as good.  You believe that he is jealous idiot, but he is just not a compelling one.  The other side actors are very good, and mostly make up for Hoffin’s dull performance.

If you have five hours to kill (less of you skip all the credits), ‘Z: The Beginning of Everything’ is an okay choice.  The 1920s are a fun period, and the Fitzgeralds defined the decade.  However much like the ’20s the show just doesn’t go very deep.  It is a lot of flash without much substance.

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Disney’s The Jungle Book Is Going To Make It Very Hard On Warner Brothers!

Disney’s The Jungle Book, the live action remake of their 1967 film, was better than it had any right to be.  The special effects were awesome, and young Neel Sethi as Mowgli was able to carry the film.  It is no wonder that this was a hit for Disney almost bringing in $1 Billion worldwide, but next year Warner Brothers is going to release its own version of Kipling’s famous book, and I am not so sure that it should.

The Jungle Book eliminated most of the flaws the original film had by updating the script to be less pro-West, and cutting Mowgli’s questionable reason for leaving the jungle.  It also fleshed out the side characters quite a bit.  The live action, while I was doubtful, did breath new life in to these characters.  Between The Jungle Book and Cinderella, Disney’s live action train shows no sign of slowing down.  Though the less said about the Alice in Wonderland movies the better.

Warner Brothers is now in a perilous position.  It has already has spent hundreds of millions to produce their version of the book with the great Andy Serkis starring and directing, but there is almost no way their version will be better, or better enough than Disney’s to make their money back.  Now there are more than enough tales to tell from Kipling’s book to make another movie, but I am not sure the audience knows that, and no matter what you do it will still be a young boy in the jungle surrounded by CG animals, so most people are just going to think it is a rip off.

Warner Brothers has already delayed the film to give it a little space from the Disney movie, and they changed the name from The Jungle Book to Jungle Book (so different), but I still think this is going to be a disaster for them.  Every time two studios have gone head to head with the same film, one movie bombs or is at least forgotten.  Deep Impact lost to Armageddon, Donte’s Peak to Volcano, Mirror Mirror to Snow White and the Huntsman, and for some reason there are always two Three Musketeers movies at the same time (please no more Three Musketeers movies).  Jungle Book will loose to The Jungle Book, and with history as its guide Warner Brothers should have known that.

I hope for Andy Serkis’ sake that Jungle Book beats my expectations, but I doubt that it will.  It seems to me, if you are a major studio and another major studio is making the same movie and theirs will be out first, you should scrap your plans, or at least put them on a long hold, but as an observer it is always fun to see who will win.  Lately Disney has been winning everything.

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How Did The Gods Of Egypt Get Made?!

Some movies deserve long reviews to talk about their significance, acting, storytelling, or to get to the root of the movie’s message.  Gods of Egypt is not such a movie.  It is all bad:  the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, the story is bad, the cinematography is bad, and to top it all off it is racist and sexist, which is bad.  Granted it is so bad that if you know what you are in for you may have a good time trashing it with your buddies.  To some up, it is the opposite of good.

What is baffling about all of this is that it was greenlit in the first place!  And not just greenlit but given a $140 Million budget, so it was a major movie for Lionsgate.  With some insiders even saying that executives hoped that Gods of Egypt would be the franchise to replace Hunger Games.  What?!  I can’t believe so many people had so much faith in this movie.  Had Wrath of the Titans been a success, maybe, but it was a failure.

Now I could see making a fun little sword and sandals movie based on Egyptian culture instead of the usual Greek based tale, and then amp up the cheese, give it a small to medium budget, and I am sure it would have played well enough.  It probably also would have been wise to cast at least a few Egyptians to be in the movie, but $140 Million with almost a completely white cast?  Surely someone must have told them that this was a bad idea.

In the end Gods of Egypt got the box office result and critical lashing it deserved, but if you are looking for a movie for Bad Movie Night, they don’t come much worse than this, and from a major studio to boot.  However, that is the only circumstance where Gods of Egypt gets any sort of recommendation.  I wish I could have been in the meeting where Lionsgate’s executive group agreed that Gods of Egypt deserved their full support.

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Shmee Revisits Morrowind!

Thanks to The Elder Scrolls Online announcing the new Morrowind expansion, I got a little nostalgic, and I decided to fire up The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and relive one of my all time favorite games.  It was not an easy process.  The first problem was that Morrowind was not designed for 64-bit computers with more than 4GB of RAM, so I had to get a mod to get it working.  Then due to the high resolution of my monitor (according to Morrowind), I had to download a new font pack, and since I was doing all that anyway, I decided to download a few mods that tweak the game’s gameplay balance, fix bugs, and improve the game’s visuals and sound.  Two hours later Morrowind was up and running on my PC.

I was ready to dive in.  All I had to do was open the trap door to the prison boat I was on…  It took about me about 30 minutes to figure out that the the ‘use’ button and the ‘activate’ button are different (The first time I played Morrowind was on the Original Xbox).  It turns out you ‘activate’ people and doors with spacebar.  The game did not tell me this, and who in their right mind uses spacebar for anything other than jumping.  All the default controls were wonky.  I mean right click brought up the menus instead of switching to magic, so after another 30 minutes of remapping my controls I was able to complete character creation and start playing the game.

Of course all the mods I had installed were not optimized, so my frame rate was swinging between 200FPS and 15FPS, so I had to do some tweaking to get everything to stay above 30FPS.  I have never had a game that looks so bad, run so poorly, but after looking in to the forums I found out the frame rate is just a problem with Morrowind on PC in general, and not my mods.  It turns out 15 years ago developers couldn’t imagine a world with 100% draw distance.

Four hours in to my quest to play Morrowind something happened, I got lost in it all over again.  I just want to go home and play it now.  The combat mechanics are sketchy, the graphics didn’t hold up, and the story is still trash, but the world of Morrowind is still one of the best ever made.  Skyrim and Oblivion have normal generic fantasy worlds (Oblivion did have its gates I guess *shudder*) , but Morrowind with its mushroom forests, boggy swamps and gray deserts are so unique and imaginative that I want to see every nook and cranny.  It is so delightfully weird, and no game will ever match the shear amount of loot you can find and use.  SO MANY EQUIPMENT SLOTS!

Most of Morrowind has not held up well, but the world is still amazing, and the loot hound in me wants to make sure I have every slot of my character filled up with something magical.  I would pay sooooo much money for a new special edition of Morrowind, but I don’t think it is ever going to happen.  Morrowind is a game for the ages, and the game that turned me in to an RPG player for life.  If you have never played it, I doubt you would be able to look past its flaws, but for those of us who have 15 years of nostalgia built up, this is still one of the best RPGs ever made.